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Imation's New USB Drive is Wireless, Not Wi-Fi

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:16:31 -0600

Imation has announced the release of the first external hard drive to use wireless USB. The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive packs a standard 1.5TB 3.5” drive, with an SSD upgrade kit coming soon. The transfer speed are said to be a respectable, but not great, 15 MB/sec.

Per the wireless USB standard, the Pro WX supports one to one connection that should limit the possibility that someone else can connect to your hard drive. But being that this is the first wireless USB hard drive, there hasn’t yet been a real world test of security. Backups can be triggered whenever the drive is within 30 feet of the (very large) receiver.

The Pro WX Wireless USB hard drive is available for purchase now for 500 smackers. The price may be a bit steep, but think how cool you’ll look not having to plug your hard drive in to anything… wait, what? Power cord? Um, can we get on that wireless power thing? At least it eliminates one of two cables.

Dane-Elec Hops on the USB 3.0 Bandwagon

Paul Lilly — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:42:00 -0500

Now that the spec has been finalized and controllers in mass production, we expect to see a lot of USB 3.0 devices in the coming weeks and months, particularly as companies look to brand their products as the "world's first" in their respective categories. Enter Dane-Elec, who claims its new line of external hard drives is the first to take advantage of the new spec (Freecom would disagree).

Plenty of storage options abound in the So SuperSpeed line, ranging in capacity from 500GB to 2TB. The series will also include Intel-branded USB 3.0 solid state drives (SSDs) with data transfer speeds of up to 250MB/s, Dane-Elec says. At full-bore, that's almost 10 times faster than currently available USB 2.0 devices.

Pricing for the new drives will start at $45 on the lower end and work its way up to $800. Catch a glimpse of the full lineup (with prices) here.

Image Credit: Dane-Elec via devicemag.com

Brando's Latest Dock Lets You Jam Thumb Drives, HDDs Into a Speaker

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:09:57 -0500

If you’ve heard of Brando (and you probably haven’t), you know that they often create wacky products that few would genuinely find useful (I’m looking at you, USB dock/thermometer). But, it looks like they’ve finally struck some gold with the SATA HDD Dock Station Combo Stereo Speaker + Hub.

The Dock Station is a (you guessed it) dock that features compatibility for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA drives, as well as space for up to two USB 2.0 devices. It also has USB audio, three-watt speakers and volume control right on the surface. And, while the speakers may not blow away of the audiophiles in the audience, it is a nice multitasker that can help assist a laptop user’s music experience, as well as provide a healthy dose of external storage.

If you’re looking to snag one of these, you can get it off of Brando’s site for $59.

Image Credit: Brando

SimpleTech Redrive

David Murphy — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:05:12 -0600

In some alternate world, Fabrik’s SimpleTech Redrive is winning a Kick Ass award from Green PC—Maximum PC’s eco-conscious sister publication. This is the most environmentally friendly external storage device we’ve ever tested. From its packaging, to its construction, to its guts, the Redrive is designed with a single purpose in mind: saving the planet. As a byproduct of this, the drive saves you energy and, consequently, money.

Saving energy generally doesn’t lead to superior speeds in the storage world. And it wouldn’t with the Redrive either if the drive had connection options other than USB. Over an eSATA connection, for example, its internal 500GB Western Digital Caviar Green drive would perform far more slowly than a majority of the external devices we’ve tested. This is because the Caviar Green drive modulates between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, sacrificing performance for energy savings when compared to the standard 7,200rpm hard drives used by most external storage products.

The Redrive's shell is constructed of bamboo and recycled aluminum. The latter doubles as a handy heatsink for the hard drive itself.

Since the Redrive is constrained to the pipeline of a USB connection, the Caviar Green’s overall speed is of less relevance. In fact, the Redrive ends up beating every other USB external device we’ve tested in our synthetic benchmarks. The catch is that you won’t notice any real-world difference, given that it beats the speeds of similar USB external drives by less than five percent.

However, the Redrive also comes bundled with the same TurboUSB technology that’s included with Buffalo’s external storage offerings. This proprietary application allows the drive to shoot past the traditional 37MB/s speed cap we’ve experienced with all other external USB drives.

Unlike Buffalo’s DriveStation Combo 4, the Redrive has a slight issue with its TurboUSB functionality. The software pushes the Redrive’s average write speeds 20 percent faster than normal, and faster than any USB-based drive we’ve tested, but it fails to increase the drive’s read speeds. This isn’t the case with the DriveStation Combo 4, which enjoys speed increases of approximately 20 percent on both its reads and writes when compared to standard USB speeds. The consequence of this is that the DriveStation Combo 4 edges out the Redrive in our real-world benchmark, PCMark05, by 2 percent.

A simple scheduled-backup application rounds out the Redrive’s feature set. While the discrepancies between the device’s TurboUSB read and write speeds are a slight ding, there is nothing else about the Redrive that makes us sour. In this case, green is golden.

Get a Grip on This Hanging Hard Drive Concept

Andy Salisbury — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:55:16 -0500

With a design so simple it falls under the “I-can’t-believe-no-one-else-thought-of-this-before” category, Sangho Jin of Yanko Design’s hanging hard drive concept is looking to clear up desk clutter, one tiny footprint at a time.

The hanging hard drive, which would mount to your laptop’s screen, provides a nice way to add additional storage to your machine without using valuable desk space. Granted, this simple shift in external HDD placement wouldn’t change any lives, there are definitely plenty of laptop users out there worried about aesthetics (looking at you, Mac users), and to them this will be a welcome change.

“Portable hard drives are not really THAT portable if you have to tote around another peripheral but maybe you should have bought a laptop with a bigger hard drive! OOO Zing! No I didn’t! Yes, yes I did just go there,” writes Yanko Design’s Long Tran on the concept’s page, “Kidding aside, the Hang it On hard drive encloser lets you hang you 2.5” companion off the back of your lappie’s LCD screen. Sure, now your MacBook Air looks like it has a tumor growing off it’s svelt lines but at least you’ll get more than a measily 80GB.”

Well said, Mr. Tran. Well said.

Image Credit: Yanko Design

Toshiba Portable External Hard Drive

David Murphy — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:06:13 -0600

We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. You aren’t going to win any speed competitions with Toshiba’s Portable External Hard Drive; we tested a 200GB version (the device itself comes in capacities ranging from 100GB to 200GB), and the resulting benchmark numbers are nothing for Toshiba to be proud of.

The drive on the inside is Toshiba’s 2.5-inch MK2035GSS. Its rotational speed is a decent 4,200rpm, although that gives way to some glaring deficits in our benchmarks. The drive’s average read speed of 29MB/s puts it well below what other all-in-one external units we’ve tested are capable of. We weren’t expecting to see Raptor-quality performance in these miniature external units, but Toshiba’s device was simply unable to outperform OWC Mercury’s On-the-Go (reviewed in August) in any of our HD Tach tests.

Granted, the Toshiba unit provides 40 more gigabytes of storage than the OWC device, but there’s something to be said for functionality. With Toshiba’s external drive, you get a USB connection. That’s it. In fact, that’s about all there is on the unit at all: no power button, no other connections. We suppose you could always unplug the device when you don’t want to use it, but what about those who want to keep the device permanently connected to their rig? A power switch would be ideal.

We do, however, love that the Toshiba drive doesn’t come with a power brick. All you need to run it are two free USB slots, a great benefit if you’re on your laptop and not near a plug.

Loads of external drives offer FireWire support, an on/off button, one-touch backup—features the Toshiba doesn’t have. We sure can’t think of a compelling reason to pick up this device, as the Toshiba is as slow as it is featureless.